CCSD police union says it didn’t file court motion to reinstate officer
The Clark County school police union says it didn’t authorize a motion filed last week in court seeking to reinstate a former police officer.
Attorney Adam Levine, general counsel for the Police Officers Association of the Clark County School District, said Thursday the union had no knowledge of the motion and its executive board didn’t authorize it.
Court records show lawyer Don Bennion filed the motion March 22 against the Clark County School District, which lists the plaintiff as the police officers union on behalf of former officer Juan Fernandez.
The motion seeks to vacate a 2015 arbitration decision that ruled Fernandez couldn’t be reinstated in his job with back pay after he was fired in 2013 following allegations by a former girlfriend that he provided four AR-15 rifles to convicted felons.
Levine, who has been general counsel for the police officers union since August 2014, said he’s extending an opportunity to Fernandez’s private attorney to appear before the union’s executive board to seek permission to utilize the union.
Bennion could not be reached for comment by phone or email.
Levine said he’s not familiar with Fernandez’s case, but added, “I am sympathetic to any officer who may have been the victim of the former internal affairs detective.”
He was referring to Detective Christopher Klemp, who headed the school district police department’s internal affairs bureau and was the investigator in Fernandez’s case.
A Review-Journal story in 2016 detailed a secretly recorded conversation by officer John Maier — who was among several school police officers assisting the FBI — with Klemp in 2014.
Klemp allegedly broke state law by disclosing details about an internal investigation and then told Maier to blame the leak on someone else or he’d face retribution. Klemp was reassigned two days after the recording of the conversation surfaced.
Attempts to reach Klemp for comment were unsuccessful.
In 2017, an arbitrator said Dan Burgess, one of the officers who cooperated with the FBI and was fired after revealing himself as an informant, had to be reinstated with more than two years of back pay. Levine was Burgess’ attorney.
Levine also delivered a letter and hundreds of pages of documentation to the Clark County District Attorney’s Office in 2016 asking for an investigation into allegations of wrongdoing involving Klemp, but the office declined the request.
Contact Julie Wootton-Greener at jgreener@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2921. Follow @julieswootton on Twitter.
